Rebuilding the house for the future: Australia could lead the way

Is the human house the last bastion of backwardness? More interestingly, is this how we, in some atavistic log-cabin corner of our collective psyche, like it? Is backward really forward? Or, to invert the question, could a futuristic house-type also feel comfortable, even beautiful? Can the future feel like home?

In a world where James Bond gadgetry is a ubiquitous daily norm – where your wrist-watch rates you in real time against your personal exercise target, your writing implement issues live "pencasts" and your car unlocks itself on approach – the house as we know it is a stand-out fail.

Illustration: Rocco Fazzari.

Our houses may be filled with and surrounded by hi-techery but the things themselves are remarkably unchanged from mud-hut days. Our biggest investment still has us fumbling for keys, fighting mysterious damp patches and chucking handfuls of sodden leaves from stormy roofs in the prayerful hope that, this time, the leak will stop.

Israeli architect Neri Oxman​ recently 3D-printed a series of photosynthetic clothes. They're not called clothes. They're called wearables, to show that they're art and therefore relieved of all practical requirements. They're also kind of hideous.

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Based on the aesthetics of the human gut, they encase the body in tens of metres of tightly squiggled translucent tubing filled with cyanobacteria that convert sunlight into glucose. Apparently in the future, with this food-producing function augmented by automatic body-repair, such clothing will enable "astrobiological" travel and pave the way, argues Oxman, to our "designing Nature herself."

I mean yes, it's kind of dopey. But could we print houses? Could houses photosynthesise? Could they feed and heal us? If not, why not? Houses are just bigger, roomier clothes. Must they be so emphatically dull?

Governments blame developers for the backwardness of the housing industry and developers, in turn, blame the market. The very magnitude of the investment, it is argued, makes buyers risk averse. Banks naturally reinforce this conservatism, refusing to lend on anything unusual.

Together, this produces a contradiction. The market pretends to be a Darwinian process, throwing up innovation as liberally as reproduction throws up genetic error, and with the same diversity-enhancing effect. But in housing, the reality is the opposite. The very mechanism we depend on for diversity, selection and progress actually ensures stagnation.

So it's no surprise that true housing innovation locates on the fringes. What is surprising, and heartening, is that those bubbling fringes are looking really interesting – even more in Australia than many more sophisticated bits of the globe.

Prefabricated and modular housing has twinkled on the architectural horizon ever since the socialist push this time last century, when quality mass dwelling became a holy grail. Genius French metalworker Jean Prouve, German Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius​ and American wunderkind Buckminster Fuller each tried to design a mass-prefab that would mass-capture hearts and minds. Each failed.

More recently, corporate giants like IKEA and Toyota have entered the game, bringing technologies and systems from furniture and car manufacture, respectively. Given this techno-prowess, and the high-end architecture rep each country enjoys, we've tended to accept their dominance of the field.

But there is a crucial factor missing: design. Of course, such houses are designed. But in the architectural sense – implying a poetic and life-enhancing calculus of material and space – they sit between the dull and the dire, playing deliberately to the design-agnostic end of the market.

Housing manufacture could replace the dodo car industry.

By contrast, Australian prefabricated housing strives for a design edge. Associate Professor Mathew Aitchison, from the Innovation in Applied Design Lab at USyd, says Australian start-ups go for accomplished architects and "houses you'd be proud to live in" – a fledgling high-design tradition that "should be encouraged and cherished."

A few examples in support of this counter-intuitive thesis: Tektum (Sydney); Happy Haus (Brisbane); Prebuilt (Melbourne) and Jigsaw (Canberra). Each has a different approach and different strengths, but none feel like prefabs, or look like McMansions.

Many people's first response to the idea of ready-made housing is "why not just live in a container?" And that's fine, if a hot steel box appeals. But you don't have to live in the thing to reap the efficiencies of containerised transport.

Tektum's modular, ultra-sustainable flatpack houses are designed in-house by architect-director Nicolas Perren. To watch them unfold on site from their container-sized cocoon is faintly magical, like watching Princess Diana, as a new bride, unfold from her coach and four. The house that emerges, after a "build" measured in days not months, is elegant, open-plan, glassy and butterfly-roofed. Summer-cool and winter-warm, it has sophisticated phase-change insulation that halves its energy bill and a flame-proof silicate skin that allows high-precision manufacture and still means you can rearrange your windows post hoc. Pretty cool.

Happy Haus grew from one man's dissatisfaction with the cost and time blowouts of custom house-building and an idea, says director Lachlan Grant, about the "democratisation of architecture." From four top-tier architects – Donovan Hill (Brisbane), Owen Vokes & Peters (Brisbane), Durbach Block Jaggers (Sydney) and O'Connor and Houle​ (Melbourne) – their range of stylish predesigned "pods" can be variously configured. Fabrication is a similar four- to 12-week period, with a one- to two-week installation (including plumbing and wiring, kitchens and bathrooms).

Prebuilt offers four "predesigned" house-types, all designed by Pleysier​ architects and variously configurable, all with 2.7m ceilings, low-E glass and oak floors. And Jigsaw, founded by an architect-scientist-builder trio, happily encourage small houses on small blocks, while also applying their modular approach to multi-unit and communal housing (something Happy Haus is also developing).

Sorry, but this stuff is exciting. Most of these houses cost $200,000 to $400,000. For about $2000 to $2500 a square metre (compared to around $6000 a square metre for most architect-designed houses) you can build lean, green, snappy, personalised and lovable.

I mean, sure. I'm fond of the old hammer-and-nails approach. But it's hugely inefficient, inexact and expensive. Housing manufacture, by contrast, could replace the dodo car industry. When we can apply it to making funky, pod-based, photosynthetic, self-unlocking, explorable inner-urban neighbourhoods, we'll really have out-Sweded the Swedes.

Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based columnist and author who holds a PhD in architecture and several international writing awards. A former editor and Sydney City Councilor, she is also Associate Professor (Practice) at the Australian Graduate School of Urbanism at UNSW. Her books include 'Glenn Murcutt: Three Houses’, 'Blubberland; the dangers of happiness’ and ‘Caro Was Here’, crime fiction for children (2014).